General ⇒ LaTeX / MS Word interoperability?

[benti]

Hey,

As of next week, I will be working in an office environment where MS Office is used as the main text processing suite. I'd rather stick to (La)TeX, though: is there a good, somewhat user-friendly way of making the two interoperable? I'm looking for a way to use both that requires no changes whatsoever for my future colleagues, and a manageable amount of hassle for myself. Did some browsing, but all I could find were some references to tex4ht, which must be the worst-documented utility of all times...

All pointers are much appreciated. Thanks,
Niels

[T3.]

It all depends on what sort of documents you will need to create/edit (e.g with math, Word editable graphics/diagrams?), if you need to collaborate on documents with your colleagues (and hence frequently round trip between Word and LaTeX) and what is "a manageable amount of hassle" for you. Personally, I would consider it a waste of time.

Cheers,

Tomek

[benti]

Hey Tomek,

thanks. I expect the basic use will be text: maybe the occasional formula, but not frequent and nothing fancy. As for 'manageable amount of hassle'; I'll only know that when you tell me roughly what methods are out there Right now it looks as though the best way is simply to paste latex input in word, and search and replace for tags.

[frabjous]

You might want to check out the "Converters from LaTeX to PC Textprocessors" and "Converters from PC Textprocessors to LaTeX" overviews at the TUG pages. When I've had to convert back and forth between LaTeX and Word, I've used the latex2rtf and rtf2latex2e programs. They've worked well enough for my purposes, though they're not going to make it so that "no changes are necessary," unless your documents are indeed the very model of simplicity.

[sitex]

Hello,

There are two commerical packages (word2tex and tex2word) that are used to do this. You can learn more about these programs by navigating to http://www.chikrii.com/ I do not them.
I have saved MS Word files in rtf and then opened them in Scientiic WorkPlace. This has worked well for me since I use SWP all the time. SWP can save files in various formats including rtf which can be opened in MSWord.

Tom

[T3.]

Right now it looks as though the best way is simply to paste latex input in word, and search and replace for tags.

Ouch! I wouldn't consider that a manageable solution at all. That's an awful lot of manual work on each conversion. Only masochists should apply

For conversion business I have experience with latex2rtf and tex4ht. The former one is faster and easier to use but the latter one is more powerful. For simple text and an occasional formula I would recommend latex2rtf but for round-tripping between LaTeX and Word tex4ht might be a better option due to better structured output (latex2rtf produces documents with mostly visual formatting). Some people claim that LaTeX sources converted to .html and renamed to .doc open just fine in Word but I've never tried that.

Going the other way around, from Word to LaTeX, I heard that writer2latex is pretty good, although I've never tried it myself.

Personally, I think you will quickly grow tired of constant back and forth conversion (I know I would), but I wish you good luck on this quest (and please share your eperiences with us).

Cheers,

Tomek